


when the sun sets (we're both the same)

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2017 [2]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Originals (TV), The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: All the Dying, Community: wishlist_fic, Gen, Gore, Hinted Abuse, I have no idea how to tag for Klaus murdering slayers throughout history, Klaus being Klaus, Minor Character Death, Murder, Not Bet Read, Prompt Fic, Reincarnation, Slayer Myth, Slayers and Watchers, Sorry?, Spike Cameo, Violence, original character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2017-12-02
Packaged: 2019-02-09 16:33:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12892044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: Klaus Mikaelson and a millennium of slayers come to die at his hands.





	when the sun sets (we're both the same)

**Author's Note:**

> For Yakshini, who prompted Klaus/Buffy, "I have stood a thousand years and not faltered; the day I met you, my legs shook." - It didn't turn out quite as shippy as you probably intended, but where most people might see romance, I tend to see murder and the quote fits that so, so well. 
> 
> (Title is, once more, from Tamer's Beautiful Crime, which makes a decent backdrop for this story, too.)

+

There is a girl in the village, with a knife hidden in her sleeve and half a dozen stakes in the folds of her skirts. 

She speaks the local tongue brokenly, bows her head too much and still fails to hide the scars marring her neck. 

She is, Klaus learns only after Kol snaps her neck like a twig and drains her corpse with his teeth fit over old marks, a slayer. 

Little murder girl, come to kill him on behest of her masters, great, civilized, Christian men in gilded houses in a far-away country. 

He kicks her body into a ditch, swipes a drop of blood from his brother’s stained chin and shrugs. “Let’s move on then, shall we?”

+

“Die, abomination!” the next one shouts and her hands are shaking, her hands are shaking and she is young, younger than Bekah, younger, maybe, than Henrik was, when the wolves ripped him to shreds.

Slip girl, shadow girl, little murder girl with death in her eyes but it’s not his. Never his. 

He smirks at her, full of teeth, and the man in the shadows, short sword in hand but not raised, hisses, “Maria!”

Sharply. 

She cringes.

Then she lunges. 

Klaus kills her quickly. He doesn’t grant her watcher the same mercy. 

+

They come two or three a decade and then none for a century as their masters lose his trail, but they always return, eventually, to avenge their fallen sisters.

All but the first came to him for vengeance and that one wasn’t even his kill.

He watches them hunt, sometimes, for days, watches their scarred hands and covered necks, their hooded eyes and stolen glances. 

When he fights them, there is always a kind of constancy, a consistency to their movements. He cannot guarantee that they will all react to that kick the same way, but they still do, nine times out of ten, bend with his motion and try to yank back on his leg and he thinks, as he follows it up with a punch that gets seven out of ten, that either their watchers are stupid, or there is something at the core of them.

Something harder than flesh and skin, and more durable than their bird-bone lives, hollow and breakable.

+

“Do you not tire of slaughtering children, brother?” Elijah asks, cleaning blood off his fingers with a kerchief.

Klaus shrugs, chucks the body out the nearest window and kicks a rug over to hide the stain. “It’s not like I go looking for them, now is it, my dear Elijah? They come to me, like moths to a flame.” He quirks a grin, full of fangs. “Or mayhaps dragon slayers to a beast of yore.”

Elijah is too restrained to roll his eyes, of course, but Klaus can tell he wants to. He licks his own fingers clean with his tongue and goes to find this little girl’s master. Maybe he’ll pull his eyes out. Be ironic, in a way. 

+

Eventually, they stop coming. 

Time or a tally of losses sees to it that there are no more lithe murderesses waiting for him at every corner and he doesn’t miss them, because they were only ever an inconvenience, only ever little girls who wanted to die. 

Murder girls, death girls, weapon girls. Slayers, all, and killers none. Not of him. Klaus Mikaelson does not die by a broken thing’s hand. 

+

It’s 1632 and a young woman with eyes like the sky and hair like fire stops in the street to stare at him, openly, boldly. 

“I dreamed you murdered me,” she says, Gaelic thick on her tongue. Cocks her head and clenches her fists in her skirts. “I dreamed you murdered all of me.”

She spins and flees, then, into a church two streets away and Klaus, in a mood, for once, to leave a butterfly her wings, lets her go.

It’s not until weeks later, drunk off his head and lying on the dirt floor of a tavern in France, that he understands her meaning. 

Huh. 

Something more than bird-bone fragility and flicker-quick lives after all. 

+

He finds one, fifty years later, give or take, in an upscale whorehouse, waiting in a corner for her ‘guardian’ to finish his ‘business’ upstairs. She sits pretty in a parlor that pretends to be better than it is and he drops down across from her, all charm and ruffles. 

He hates the bloody ruffles. 

She blinks at him, ducks, turns her head and pretends she can’t hear what happens upstairs as well as he can. He orders wine for them both and watches her as she steals glances at him in-between sending furtive glares at the ceiling. 

There is something like fire in her, a set to her jaw, an age to the corners of her eyes. More woman than girl, that one, more person than weapon, but Klaus tries to see himself in her eyes and fails. 

Asks instead, “Is it true that you dream of me?”

“I beg your pardon, sir?” she thinks he’s mistaking her for a whore, but where there should be a blush, a scandalized gasp of outrage, or a claim of ignorance, there is only a flat stare.

Oh.

“Is it true that you dream of me murdering you and draining your corpse? I heard a rumor.”

He flaps his hands, _what can you do_ , and barely twists out of the way of the stake she throws with deadly accuracy, followed by the table and then the chair. 

She fights with anything and everything at hand, twists a knife from one hand to the other too quick for even him to follow and snarls obscenities in three languages as she does. A servant comes running in to see what the brawl is about and when Klaus breaks his neck and flings him at her, she neatly sidesteps the body and glares, and he was right, he was right. 

There is something like fire at the core of them, something like steel and diamond, something like _him_ , immortal and vicious and this time, this one, when he kicks her, she twists under it instead and throws his balance off with a shoulder to his thigh, nothing bird fragile about her, this girl weapon.

Nothing scared until a bellow from the doorway, her name, sharp and hard, and she shrinks into herself, loses her savagery and the beauty of her teeth-grin, until she sinks into herself and – 

“The pity is,” he tells her watcher later, the man broken at his feet, “that she was perfect until you reminded her that she was broken.”

He thinks of Mikael, sometimes, when he kills these men with their heavy silk brocades, their learned ways and smooth, pale hands. Thinks of Mikael and how children break and kills them all the slower. 

He leaves the body there, in a house full of dead whores. 

The bird girl he takes with him, to bury in the woods. 

+

“Do you think they are born knowing what they are?” Bekah asks, drunk and dancing slowly to some tune only she can hear. 

Klaus told her of the last one, the brave one, and she’s been maudlin since, seeing a human weapon in every girl who crosses her line of sight. Making romance out of murder, as she is won’t to do, his darling sister. 

Turned too young, her and Kol both, eternally children in the way they interact with the world, one in love with it, and one in hate. 

“I think you put too much bloody thought into it.” It’s a lie, that, but he’s not going to tell her that. Instead, he pours her another drink.

\+ 

There’s a man, vampire, youngster, once, before Mystic Goddamn Falls, before all that mess. His hair is eye-searing and his clothes scream undead rebel. He smokes too much and doesn’t drink enough, keeps his eyes sharp and his grin sharper and Klaus is torn between liking him and snapping his neck.

William the Bloody, he boasts, slayer of slayers, two for two, and had himself a damn good day, he did. 

“They want it, you see? That missed punch, that sloppy kick, all of them craving it. All of them wishing for it. Wanting to know what it feels like.” He smirks. “Could tell ‘em, of course, been there, haven’t we? But I say, where’s the fun in that?”

But maybe they do know, Klaus thinks, maybe they always know just what their end will feel like, has always felt like. Maybe what screams from their dulled gazes isn’t curiosity but longing. Fond remembrance. 

+

And then there is her. 

A thousand years, a dozen dead girls, more, more, and none of them have moved him, none of them have been more than broken dolls to be disposed of, more than distractions, food, play, and then there is _her_. 

Sun hair and spring eyes, scarred hands and scarred neck, little murder girl with a knife in each hand and, more importantly, always, always more importantly, a smirk on her lips. A wry twist, a knowing thing, little murder girl is finally in on the joke.

She steps around the prone form of another one, weapon girl, butterfly girl, bird-bone girl, doesn’t spare her heaving, gasping form a second glance. Still alive, but not for long, not if she hadn’t come and there’s one slayer already on the ground so she can’t be –  
But she is. 

For a thousand years, Klaus has studied the way these girls break and he _knows_ that one. 

For a thousand years he caught glimpses of the steel core, the iron will, of the savagery in them, the fight, the fire. The way they parried and punched, the way they sometimes snarled, teeth bared, more animal than weapon. The way they wore a thousand faces but only every looked like a single person when they spun out of his reach in a whirl of hair and skirts. 

He caught glimpses of that constant at their hearts, that North star inside of them and now, here she is. 

The core. The constant. 

There is age in the corner of her eyes and glee at her mouth. Savagery in the curl of her fingers on her weapons and amusement in the twitch of her eyebrows. A human woman instead of a little murder girl, a creature than can do more than die. 

“Get back and then get out, Vi,” she tells the bird-bone girl, eyes fixed on him. “Now.”

“Buffy,” she gasps. Her hair is red. Like fire. He wonders if she dreamed of him. 

“Go.”

She goes. Meek, beaten, limping. Alive. 

“Niklaus Mikaelson,” Buffy says, name rolling off her tongue. Her mouth quirks. “You know, there’s a strict ‘keep away’ order stamped on everything the Council had on you. Apparently, you hold the record for dead slayers.”

“And yet, more kept coming,” he counters, rocking on his heels, licking blood from his lips. Little Vi’s blood. 

No reaction. 

“More kept being sent,” she corrects, sharply.

Mikael with his hand raised, screaming threats and Mikael with his sword in hand, murdering his children. Klaus blinks away the dissonance to cocks his head and demands, “Did you dream of me, then? I was told you do.”

She shrugs. “We all do. We get the deaths, every single one, over time. It’s like a reel of ‘mistakes to avoid at risk of death’. You feature a hell of a lot.”

“I’m flattered.”

She snorts. “Don’t be.”

She lunges for him, then, and he tries to block her with his knee only to be sent flying as she spins around and hits him in the back, a new move, a fast one, and oh, Klaus has been waiting for this. 

A thousand years and all they ever were, those little girls, was shadows. But this one, this one is real. This one is made of diamond and blood and as he rights himself, she turns on him, dropping one knife in exchange for a stake.

She crouches, ready to move and Klaus lets his eyes bleed monster, looks for a puppet master at the edges of the room and finds no-one there. 

She catches him in a kick and he takes her legs out from under her, tastes blood as she goes down swinging. 

He has no idea how this fight will end. No certainty, no plan of action. Nothing. Not against her, fire-forged and blooded, a woman worthy of her title. 

A thousand years and her hands aren’t shaking. 

Finally. 

+


End file.
